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Many Face Street as Chicago Project Nears End

David Seals has lived 43 of his 51 years in the Ida B. Wells housing project, most of the time as part of the invisible colony of men whose names do not appear on Chicago Housing Authority leases but who nonetheless sleep in its beds.

Sheba Lovia Hinkle, 33, moved into Wells in 1991 and was evicted a year later because of her boyfriend's drug dealing. But she stayed, shuttling with her six children among friends' apartments in the low-rise walkups that make up this sprawling development on the South Side a few blocks from Lake Michigan.

And then there is Austin, 44, a heroin addict who grew up in Wells and recently hijacked a vacant unit in an adjacent building, changing the locks before moving in a mattress.

''I knew the lady who used to live up here -- when she left, she just left the door open for me,'' said Austin, who would not give his last name. ''You don't know when they may come and board it up and you have to find another one -- if there is another.''

These illegal residents, along with many legal tenants who have large families with special needs or who have violated their leases, are among hundreds in the Wells community who could soon end up homeless as the housing authority's half-empty buildings are demolished to make way for mixed-income developments, according to a study being released on Thursday by the Washington-based Urban Institute.

In the first comprehensive census conducted at Wells, a half-square mile of dilapidated brick buildings, researchers found 388 squatters, including 94 children, camping out in vacant units and hallways. Among about 2,000 legal residents, the study says, one in five have lease violations -- mostly unauthorized roommates or nonpayment of rent or utilities -- that could make them ineligible for relocation by the housing authority, and a third need four- and five-bedroom apartments that are difficult to find in the private market.

Nearly halfway through the authority's 10-year transformation plan, the most ambitious of a nationwide effort to tear down the vast public housing projects that had become devastating enclaves of concentrated poverty, the study says the city is unprepared to accommodate residents who do not qualify for Section 8 housing vouchers or meet strict criteria for entry into the new developments. A separate study of housing projects in seven cities nationwide, scheduled for release this month by the Center for Community Change, found similar problems: that 72,000 public housing units about to face the wrecking ball would be replaced by just 41,500 new units.

While a federal government program, Hope VI, is meant to help people break dependence on public housing through employment, access to middle-class neighborhoods and even home ownership, the new research suggests it will leave the most desperate residents crashing through an unraveling safety net.

''C.H.A. housing has been the housing of last resort for a long time,'' said Susan Popkin, a senior researcher at the nonpartisan but left-leaning Urban Institute, who led the Wells study. ''People who could move easily are gone. These are the people who don't fit, who've got the most problems.''

Meghan Hart, the housing authority's managing director of resident services, and B.J. Walker, the city's chief of human infrastructure, raised questions about some of the numbers in Ms. Popkin's study and said that, in any case, they are offering a menu of services to support people as the projects come down. With $2 million from the federal government, the city is building 90 units of transitional housing that should be ready by October. Nonprofit groups contracted by the city are also working with residents to provide job training, addiction counseling and general help with relocation.

''No nonleaseholder will become homeless, and no leaseholder will lose their entitlement to housing,'' Ms. Walker said. ''Bottom line, our principle is also they've got to bring something to the party. You can't come and just say I want to sit somewhere and live.''

Since the relocation process began in 1999, the C.H.A. has moved about 3,000 of more than 14,000 resident families, including about 500 of the 1,200 who were then living legally in Wells, where demolition has been slower than in notorious high-rise projects like Cabrini Green, Robert Taylor and Stateway Gardens. Wells, actually a conglomeration of four developments, originally had 3,200 units; all but a handful being preserved for history will be torn down and replaced by a mixed-income project of 3,000 units, one-third of them set aside as public housing.

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Richard Wheelock of Chicago's Legal Assistance Foundation, who helped residents negotiate a landmark Relocation Rights Contract, said he feared that harsh punishment for lease violations and strict eligibility rules for new developments would create ''two classes of public housing families.''

''You're going to have first-class public housing in the mixed-income developments,'' he said, ''and you're going to have all the so-called problem families in the rehabbed developments.''

In January, Alex Polikoff, a lawyer at Business and Professional People for the Public Interest, filed a class-action lawsuit claiming that the relocation violated fair-housing laws because many residents using Section 8 vouchers landed in high-poverty, all-black neighborhoods that replicated the problems of the projects. But Mr. Polikoff said it is unrealistic to expect the housing authority to find dwellings for illegal residents.

''The pain and suffering and the horror of homelessness that these people may suffer has to be set on one side of the scale,'' he said. ''On the other side of the scale has to be the benefits to other families, and to the society at large, of getting rid of Ida B. Wells and Robert Taylor, and those benefits are considerable.''

Over four months this winter, Urban Institute researchers interviewed three-quarters of the 750 official resident families of Wells. The study suggests that 100 families are at risk of losing their rights to replacement housing because they have household members whose names are not on the lease. Another problem highlighted by the study is a mismatch of unit size: 34 percent of Wells residents said they needed at least four bedrooms, but only 10 to 15 percent of the new developments will be such large units.

One is Vickie Foxx, 31, who lives with her seven children in a five-bedroom spread. She has no desire to leave. ''I've been here all my life -- I like my lakefront,'' she said. ''That's where my family moments are at.''

Amid the windows and doors blocked by wood or steel panels, children at Wells still toss a flat basketball through a plastic crate, and teenagers in gang colors hover along an infamous drug corridor. Legal residents worry about relocation, but most at risk are squatters like Austin. The Urban Institute found that 28 percent of the squatters had camped in vacant units and hallways in Wells for more than a year.

''Don't have nowhere else to go,'' Austin said. He has written on the bedroom door, ''To learn: Is not the repeat of the wrong.''

A half-step up from the squatters is Ms. Hinkle, who has spent more than a decade bunking with friends but is established enough to teach dance at the recreation center. The woman whose apartment she is sharing expects to get her Section 8 voucher and move out within a couple of months, leaving Ms. Hinkle and her six children, who survive on $650 a month in food stamps, without somewhere to sleep.

''I don't know what tomorrow holds,'' she said. ''I feel like good things come to those who wait. I feel like it may be my turn.''

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A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2003, on Page A00014 of the National edition with the headline: Many Face Street as Chicago Project Nears End. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe